In the words of Dr Cathy Ryan, "If you don't write it down, it never happened".
To paraphrase one of my clients, "Every day is a school day".
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The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
My blog is PERSONAL, and is a repository of the stuff that I learn, play with, enjoy and want to share.
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Thursday, 11 October 2007

WebSphere Portlet Factory - Things I Did Not Know

As mentioned, my knowledge of WPF has increased in leaps and bounds as I progress through the course ( and this is the 3-day introduction; I've the 1-day advanced course to come tomorrow ).

Imported models seem pretty cool - think of it this way: -

Developer A works on the back-end integration, using direct database/application access or, more likely, a services layer ( whether using web services or not ). This results in a model.

Developer B works on the front-end user interface, applying Web 2.0-like artifacts such as Ajax, Dojo etc. as well as CSS, JSF, JSP etc. This results in a model.

Developer C ( or the architect, which would be me me me ) ties the two models together; for example, he/she creates a third model which is, effectively, the application/portlet framework, and simply imports the other two models into it.

At this stage, all of the builder calls in both imported models are available for Developer C to use, without needing to be bothered about the actual implementation e.g. JDBC vs DAO, JSF vs JSP, Ajax vs Dojo etc.

This provides the ultimate abstraction - if the mechanism of data access changes in the future ( from JDBC to WSDL ), Developer A changes their model, and Deveoper C re-imports it.

The other big revelation was profiling - I kinda knew how powerful this way, especially as I've seen it demonstrated so many times. However, I'd never actually used it.

In essence, Developers A and B both identify builder inputs that can be profiled ( can relate to different use cases ), and associates those inputs with a specific profile set/profile.